A GUIDING LIGHT OR A DEAD HAND?
By Yonoson Rosenblum | MARCH 4, 2020
Revealed religion is antithetical to the progressive mindset
After the recent passing of Roger Scruton, considered by many the foremost conservative thinker of the last 50 years (and a one-time lecturer at a Tikvah Fund summer program for kolleleit), Daniel Hannan paid tribute to his great mentor. Hannan, a former member of the European Parliament and perhaps the most articulate advocate for Brexit, began with a story from his schoolboy days. Scruton had spoken to Hannan’s class, and at the end of his lecture in modern language theory, he asked the class whether they had any questions.
Mostly to break an awkward silence, Hannan thrust his hand in the air and asked, “What is the role of a conservative thinker in our day?”
Sir Roger responded, “To reassure the people that their prejudices are true.” By prejudice he did not mean the modern usage of prejudice as a synonym for racism or bigotry. Rather, he intended prejudice in its proper meaning — those things pre-judged based on past experience.
As Hannan rephrased Scruton’s words, “Life would be unlivable if we treated each situation by reasoning from first principles, disregarding the wisdom of our ancestors, and ignoring our own rules of thumb worked out on the basis of past experiences in similar situations.”
In Hannan’s four-minute tribute, I discovered the answer to a question that has long puzzled me: Why, when people become religious, do they almost inevitably become much more conservative politically? The obvious answer is that they recoil from the modern progressive agenda, which is anathema to traditional religion in many ways — for example, in its glorification of abortion as a sacrament and its upending of traditional views of marriage and family.
But I think the matter goes deeper than particular policies advocated, and centers on attitudes toward the past. For the believing Jew, the decisive event in human history took place at Sinai over 3,300 years ago. For Torah Jews, the superiority of early generations is axiomatic: Amoraim do not argue against Tannaim; Acharonim don’t take issue with Rishonim.